Article Preface

This article is not meant to be an exhaustive setup guide and assumes that the reader has setup an Arch system before. Arch newbies are encouraged to read the Beginners' Guide if unsure how to preform standard tasks such as creating users, managing the system, etc.

Caveats for HDMI Audio

Video

HDMI / Analog TV-Out

Use the -s parameter to check the status of your display, the -o parameter to turn your display off and -p parameter to power on HDMI with preferred settings.

Adjustments are likely required to correct proper overscan/underscan and are easily achieved in boot/config.txt in which many tweaks are set. To fix, simply uncomment the corresponding lines and setup per the commented instructions:

# uncomment the following to adjust overscan. Use positive numbers if console
# goes off screen, and negative if there is too much border
#overscan_left=16
overscan_right=8
overscan_top=-16
overscan_bottom=-16

Users wishing to use the analog video out should consult this config file which contains options for non-NTSC outputs.

A reboot is needed for new settings to take effect.

X.org driver

The X.org driver for Raspberry Pi can be installed with the xf86-video-fbdev package:

# pacman -S xf86-video-fbdev

Onboard Hardware Sensors

Temperature

Temperatures sensors can be queried with utils in the raspberrypi-firmware-tools package. The RPi offers a sensor on the BCM2835 SoC (CPU/GPU):

Overclocking/Underclocking

The optional xxx_min lines define the min usage of their respective settings. When the system is not under load, the values will drop down to those specified. Consult the Overclocking article on elinux for additional options and examples.

A reboot is needed for new settings to take effect.

Note: The overclocked setting for CPU clock applies only when the governor throttles up the CPU, i.e. under load.

Raspberry Pi Camera module

The commands for the camera module are including as part of the raspberrypi-firmware-tools package - which is installed by default. You can then use:

$ /opt/vc/bin/raspistill
$ /opt/vc/bin/raspivid

You need to append to /boot/config.txt:

start_file=start_x.elf
fixup_file=fixup_x.dat

Optionally

disable_camera_led=1

Hardware Random Number Generator

ArchLinux ARM for the Raspberry Pi is distributed with the rng-tools package installed and the bcm2708-rng module set to load at boot (see this), but we must also tell the Hardware RNG Entropy Gatherer Daemon (rngd) where to find the hardware random number generator.

This can be done by editing /etc/conf.d/rngd:

RNGD_OPTS="-o /dev/random -r /dev/hwrng"

and restarting the rngd daemon:

systemctl restart rngd

Once completed, this change ensures that data from the hardware random number generator is fed into the kernel's entropy pool at /dev/random.

GPIO

Python

To be able to use the GPIO pins from Python, you can use the RPi.GPIO library.

To install it, first install the base-devel group. Download the latest version of the library from PyPI (link above), extract it and run the following command: